> If this indeed the case, what real validity can we accord an idea of> the "primitive" in its "modern" context, and can we afford to make> uncritical use of it as a theoretical category?

None. As I just finished telling my students (after they watched a film on the
Yanomami): "The Yanomami are not primitive people. They are totally,
completely, and fully modern people who happen to be different from us (North
Americans) in their patterns of subsistence, patterns of economic behavior,
sociopolitical organization, and much else. They are not living fossils from
the "stone age" or anywhere else. In all that is central to being human, they
are us. To think otherwise is to be wrong."